Candice E. Jackson is the top civil rights official at Trump's Department of Education. She has made the case of the students accused of sexual assault on campus her priority. The New York Times has written about her plans to alter the procedures universities and colleges use in handling sexual assault claims to strengthen the rights of those accused.
This post is not about the important question how colleges and universities should handle sexual assault claims or if they should leave those to the police, but on the way the story is framed in the article. That way presents the case of the wrongly accused as a fairly common one*, and the consequences of false accusations as devastating:
The letters have come in to her office by the hundreds, heartfelt missives from college students, mostly men, who had been accused of rape or sexual assault. Some had lost scholarships. Some had been expelled. A mother stumbled upon her son trying to take his own life, recalled Candice E. Jackson, the top civil rights official at the Department of Education.Heartbreaking, indeed. Jackson also states:
“Listening to her talk about walking in and finding him in the middle of trying to kill himself because his life and his future were gone, and he was forever branded a rapist — that’s haunting,” said Ms. Jackson, describing a meeting with the mother of a young man who had been accused of sexual assault three months after his first sexual encounter.
The young man, who maintained he was innocent, had hoped to become a doctor.
Investigative processes have not been “fairly balanced between the accusing victim and the accused student,” Ms. Jackson argued, and students have been branded rapists “when the facts just don’t back that up.” In most investigations, she said, there’s “not even an accusation that these accused students overrode the will of a young woman.”
“Rather, the accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right,’” Ms. Jackson said.
Ms. Jackson later issued a statement clarifying that the conclusion was based on feedback from cases involving accused students, and even if complaints don’t allege violence, “all sexual harassment and sexual assault must be taken seriously.”
Astonishingly, Jackson seems to suggest that ninety percent of all accusations of sexual violence on college campuses are false, perhaps based on how she interprets the evidence.
I would very much like to know what the "feedback" means in that quote. Who told her that the correct interpretations of ninety percent of all investigations is to conclude that there was no sexual assault, just bad drunk sex and suddenly the man found himself almost arbitrarily accused of violence? Is the source of that "feedback" the accused students? And if so, what would students who are actually guilty of rape or sexual violence say? Fair cop, sir, I did it?
I am not belittling the horrible suffering someone falsely accused of a crime will experience. But the experience of rape is also one that causes horrible suffering**:
Megan Rondini, a young college student in Alabama, killed herself in 2016, a year after she alleged that she was raped by an influential local businessman***, Rehtae Parsons, a teenage Canadian girl, killed herself in 2013, and Audrie Potts, a teenage American girl, killed herself in 2012. Both Parsons and Potts alleged that they were gang-raped by teenage boys while being incapacitated by alcohol.
It will be interesting to watch Ms. Jackson's approach to enforcing civil rights! On the one hand she herself is a survivor of a sexual assault. On the other hand, she appears to have decided that ninety percent of all sexual violence claims on college campuses are false. On the third hand, but linked to that second hand, she used to work for Judicial Watch, a conservative legal organization which bombards me regularly with news about how close they finally are to getting Hillary Clinton brought to court. Finally, and on the fourth hand (yes, I know), Ms. Jackson has argued that she was a victim of reverse racism in college, and she
...also has written extensively in favor of an economist, Murray N. Rothbard, who called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “monstrous” and "the source of all the rest of the ills," as well as denounced compulsory education, according to the report.Duh. Who am I kidding here? It's standard Republican practice to award those departments Republicans hate to people who hate them: The fox-guarding-the -chicken-coop principle. There's no reason to assume that this case is any different.
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* The misogynist online sites argue that false claims are a humongous percentage of all rape claims. Research suggests that they are wrong. See this and this post for more on that.
** The list below is not intended to be inclusive in any sense, but consists of the three suicides I could remember off the top of my head. Suicides are not the only possible extreme consequence of rape for some victims. Other consequences can include PTSD, the inability to build and maintain close and loving relationships and so on. Some survivors need years or decades of expensive therapy.
*** The linked article is a long read, but very much recommended for its nuanced contents.